Coronary artery disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The ability to better diagnose, monitor, and treat coronary artery diseases can be of life saving importance. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a catheter-based imaging modality that uses light to peer into coronary artery walls and generate images thereof for study. Utilizing coherent light, interferometry, and micro-optics, OCT can provide video-rate in-vivo tomography within a diseased vessel with micrometer level resolution.
Viewing subsurface structures with high resolution using fiber-optic probes makes OCT especially useful for minimally invasive imaging of internal tissues and organs. This level of detail made possible with OCT allows a clinician to diagnose as well as monitor the progression of coronary artery disease. OCT images provide high-resolution visualization of coronary artery morphology and can be used alone or in combination with other information such as angiography data and other sources of subject data to aid in diagnosis and planning such as stent delivery planning
Imaging of portions of a patient's body provides a useful diagnostic tool for doctors and others. OCT, ultrasound and other data collection modalities use guide catheters to position a probe in a blood vessel prior to collecting data. In many circumstances, collecting data when a data collection probe is within the guide catheter is undesirable. Accordingly, a need therefore exists to detect the location of a guide catheter. The present disclosure addresses this need and others.